Propounded imbroglio, sub rosa.
|
2005-06-07 - 11:02 p.m.
I miss her a lot, and sometimes it makes me sad when I'm walking from one place to another. I miss her as she is now, alive and well and at the other end of the island, but what feels the most strange and sad: I miss being a little girl, the times that I had then when it was just me and her, my memories fill me with an extremely bittersweet something. It feels like hurt, like an aching muscle being massaged. Oh, that's right, the heart is a muscle. Before I was old enough to go to school, I could go with her when she did weekly trips into town for shopping. We would go on the bus. She was always quite silent, I don't remember a lot of talking between us, rather a more quiet partnership. (I was about to say that perhaps this was because I was a pre-schooler, and maybe not such a great conversationalist, but then I remembered that actually that is not true. When I was two, I greeted my Dad's new wife with a polite, "Hello Nicola, you look very nice today.") The library was a huge part of our journey, she would just let me go and find my own books. This is making me feel sad and weird talking about this. Lunch in a cafe somewhere. No not a cafe, because this was New Zealand in 1981. A Tearoom of course. The half glass of wine I just drank is making the word Tearoom look strange and that is making me question my whole identity as a New Zealander. Perhaps even the singular is "Tearooms". Why is writing about your parents so hard? Anyway, my life with my mother is all about little gifts. Actual things, not "gifts", though there is that too of course. When I was at school and unable to accompany her to town during the week, little gifts would be left on my bed for me to come home to. These were things I needed: new sweatshirts or tights or underwear, colouring pens, notebooks, toothbrushes, hairbrushes. But I would get so excited about them and thank her with much enthusiasm, and it has never, ever left me - this joy of household items and necessities. No wonder going to the supermarket is practically a hobby for me. A pink kitchen sponge? Delightful! Mmm, a lovely new carton of milk, how truly GOOD! Plain white cotton socks? Hallelujah and god bless the bombastic bliss of it all. PS: I actually do know that bombastic has generally quite negative meanings, but I am using it ironically to mean extravagant and I also know that it comes from Medieval Latin bombax or bombac, which means cotton.
|
|